"I think it's well accepted and proven that cardiovascular disease (heart attack, stroke) can be prevented and even reversed by a whole-foods, plant-based low-fat diet."

There is actually scarce to non-existent evidence of this. For example a chart of populations consumption habits comparing fat and cholesterol intake and heart disease is a scatter graph - no relationship (see the MONICA study). Even the Framingham studies which started it all show that in men over the age of 50, higher cholesterol leads to lower mortality in normal adults. Probably not what you've heard. Drug companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to prove the connection between cholesterol and heart disease and to date have failed. They have tried their best, because this is a $20B yearly business for them which could be increase 10 fold if only everyone can be made a patient. In fact there are entire populations whose diet consists of nearly 100% animal fat, yet have very low rates of heart disease.

And, since we are talking about medical studies here, one must be skeptical of all of them to some extent:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

This paper makes a good argument the researchers generally find what they set out to find, regardless of the truth.

Now, everyone is different, if you feel good about eating veggie then by all means continue. But the quoted opening sentence cannot be supported by a convincing body of scientific evidence, and there are plenty of conflicting and confounding studies to disprove it.